Gpa Takes Over For Sat In Ncaa

Dave Fairbank

November 05, 2002|By DAVE FAIRBANK Daily Press

There's a punchline somewhere in the fact that the NCAA Board of Directors chose Halloween to announce major changes to freshman eligibility requirements.

Opponents of Proposition 48 and its offspring, the law of the land for the past 16 years, have long maintained that the NCAA's attempt to increase academic standards was more trick than treat to high school athletes.

Supporters saw the combination of grade-point averages and standardized test scores as a necessary means of determining if recruited athletes were capable of more than simply dressing up as college students.

All that changed last week when the NCAA board approved a series of reforms that places greater emphasis on grade-point averages and essentially eliminates minimum scores on standardized tests for freshmen to become eligible at Division I schools.

"It seems like some common sense has kicked in," Phoebus High football coach and athletic director Bill Dee said. "Putting more onus on a kid's GPA is going to help more kids than it's going to hurt."

The current setup has a sliding scale of GPAs and corresponding test scores but requires that high school athletes score at least 820 on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Under the new rule, which takes effect Aug. 1, 2003, freshmen may become eligible with lower standardized test scores, provided their GPA is high enough to offset the scores. A recruit could score the minimum 400 -- what you get for signing your name -- and be eligible with a 3.55 GPA in core academic courses.

Athletes still must maintain a 2.0 GPA in core courses and now must complete 14 courses, rather than 13. A 2.0 grade-point average will require a 1010 on the SAT.

"Over the years, the national exam has been, more often than not, the confusing component for kids coming into college," Old Dominion basketball coach Blaine Taylor said. "In practicality, I lean toward a youngster's performance in the classroom and what they've done on a daily basis to prepare themselves for college, rather than a one-time test."

The other side of the reforms will require that athletes, once they reach college, make faster progress toward graduation to remain eligible. They must complete more credit hours in their first two years, with fewer remedial courses.

Former ACC great Len Elmore, a graduate of Harvard Law School who now runs an educational venture dedicated to closing what he calls the "achievement gap" between affluent and impoverished students, said there is good and bad to the new setup.

"I think you need some kind of absolute criteria," he said Sunday at the ACC's annual Operation Basketball in Greensboro, N.C.

"In some respects, eliminating the SAT is good because the test has proven, in many cases, to be culturally biased. But at the same time, you need a barometer."

"No one is monitoring the high schools," he said. "They are loath to hold back the student-athlete who can't read, and they abdicate the responsibility of educating that kid to the college."

Taylor compared changing the initial eligibility requirements to tweaking the tax codes. "People are always searching for loopholes," he said. "In the underbelly of academics and athletics, there's a small percentage that's going to find a sordid side to this stuff."

The use of standardized tests for freshman eligibility has been a lightning rod since it was implemented in 1986. Former Georgetown coach John Thompson boycotted two games in protest. A U.S. District Court judge ruled against the sliding scale's standardized test component in 1999, a decision that was later reversed.

The new policy follows the recommendation of the NCAA's own study, released earlier this year, which showed that grade-point average was a better indicator than test scores of success in college.

"If a kid has a good GPA, he must be doing something right," Dee said. "Four years of school is going to be more important than taking that test the morning after a football game."

Dave Fairbank can be reached at 247-4637 or by e-mail at dfairbank@dailypress.com